How to fix F1?

[proteus]

I want to give my opinion here as well because it differs quite a lot from what some/many people in this thread are proposing. I think that is very interesting, and I'm not entirely sure what may be the cause of this.

First, I started watching F1 shortly after 2010. That means, for me, an F1 car has always had DRS and a (K)ERS system. Also, that was near the end of the V8's, so I never grew to associate the screaming V10 and V12 engines with Formula 1. This all probably has a noticeable impact on how I see Formula 1 today.

The screaming V10 and V12 engines from past times do sound impressive, that is for sure. But I also find them rather annoying (please forgive me) after hearing them for a while. And importantly, they don't spark the "hey that's proper F1" feeling in me like they do for some of you, apparently.

For me, Formula 1 is at least as much an engineering competition as it is a driver competition. That means technology should be on the bleeding edge. And being better than the rest by building the superior car is part of F1 for me. A balance of performance regulation would partially destroy what I like about F1.
But bleeding edge should also mean that reliability is not as close to 100% as it is now. In that regard, I agree a lot with the suggestions of @Andi76. Make the teams push their car more to the limit to make reliability a bigger factor again.

Additionally, pushing to the limit would mean that we the viewers can better see the incredible work that the drivers are doing. I wouldn't even necessarily argue that the car, fuel and tire management they are doing nowadays is much less demanding. But it is certainly something that the viewer doesn't visibly see much of. Wrestling the car while pushing to the limit is much better to watch.

Reintroducing refuelling would be interesting, for sure. More strategic options are certainly interesting for the avid fan. If you want to cater to a more casual audience as well, this added complexity is maybe not a good idea. And while I'd enjoy it a lot, I'm not sure that it would be beneficial for the sport overall.

In general, the ideas like BOP, reverse grids, going back to screaming V10s (or other engines just for the sake of the sound) are really not appealing to me. F1 should be an engineering competition. F1 should not be what it was back at some point. It should be on the bleeding edge of technology and that bleeding edge is moving forward and F1 needs to move with it.

I started in 98, and to me F1 hit its peak somewhere in 99-00, held up there until 2002 and than gradually started to slide downhill. Mostly due to the great arrival of manufacturers which made an allready expensive sport even more expensive and neverending rule change with more and more limitations added.

The beauty if V10s was not only brutality, but also their fragility. Tou never knew when an engine will blow. Cars were twitchy, snappy and even champions were caught off guard from time to time and went off track. Tracks had gravel traps and mistakes cist drivers much more time than they do today where they simply drive out of track, many times full throttle. Liveries were diverse, cars in all shapes and sizes. Gaps between drivers were from few tenths, to seconds just between few places. Seeing underdogs get a surprise podium or points was great.

Today F1 is just too bland, monotone and standardised. Half of the grid gets points, only few cars retire. Many drivers are more like teenagers than men and simply lacking charisma. Racing became more of damage control than pushing flatout. Cost saving everywhere and coasting in the race. There is no real rivalry, because when one team gets ahead it will stay there for a whole season or even more seasons due to the prohibition of testing and funding. I personally also dislike that 10 cars are in less than a second apart in quali, which mean if someone was unlucky by a gust of wind, it can be a difference if 5th or 10th on the grid.

F1 was great when privateers made majority of the grid, when corporations take over everything changes.

[chaoticflounder]

1. What would happen if the driver (or maybe even all) salaries were lumped into the overall cost cap?
2. Is there a gardening leave that is typically enforced (by the teams) on technical staff right now? What would happen if that was strictly prohibited in the rules? (Allowing individuals to move more freely across teams and disperse the "winning formula" more quickly.)
3. My (opinion) is the largest problem now is the underfloor design is the largest difference maker but also the most well hidden. If I recall correctly, the 2021 floor was flat underneath and most of the aero components that made the largest difference were visible externally allowing the good concepts to be reviewed by other teams further down the grid (supports Zynerji's post earlier).
What would happen if the design of the winning car was required to be released at the end of the season? I mean F1 is about "development," right?

[proteus]

1. What would happen if the driver (or maybe even all) salaries were lumped into the overall cost cap?
2. Is there a gardening leave that is typically enforced (by the teams) on technical staff right now? What would happen if that was strictly prohibited in the rules? (Allowing individuals to move more freely across teams and disperse the "winning formula" more quickly.)
3. My (opinion) is the largest problem now is the underfloor design is the largest difference maker but also the most well hidden. If I recall correctly, the 2021 floor was flat underneath and most of the aero components that made the largest difference were visible externally allowing the good concepts to be reviewed by other teams further down the grid (supports Zynerji's post earlier).
What would happen if the design of the winning car was required to be released at the end of the season? I mean F1 is about "development," right?

It is a bit unfair to throw IP out to those which didnt do their homework right. Those designs all cost money and you basically give a free ride to others and spare them a bunch of cash for next season, while you spend money to design and build the thing all by yourself.

The aero became very strict, legality boxes are smaller than ever. If you squint your eyes, the cars are very similar to each other. This itself is the cause why F1 is very predictable and why RedBull can have such an advantage from year after year. Allowing the transfer of IP to the whole field would mean cars being even more similar, and the lead team still making further progress, where everyone else would be again lagging behind. You get a continuos cycle with that.

The main obstacle as far as i see it is an overall lack of testing. If the testing would be unlimited again, you would have Ferrari, Mercedes and even Mclaren and Aston being able to get something right and to bring the fight to RedBull. But if you give the whole field only 3 days of testing together, there is no way anyone can perform a miracle and if RedBull makes a step further, everyone will fall behind even more.

Preseason testnig should be unlimited and free to perform anywhere a team likes to do it and can afford it. This would also mean that noone would know how fast anyone really is before the season either.

[proteus]

My proposal would be as follows:

-Budget cap of 300 million per season. (RedBull, Ferrari, Mercedes and probably Aston and Mclaren can get that sort of money together without too much of a problem) - others as we can see are able to muster atleast 150, so the difference would not be so big as it was in the past.

-The field should be extended to 12 or 13 teams

-Incoming teams should pay a 20mil entry fee per season for 5 seasons, which would be given to other teams as compensation

-Half of prize money should be given by performance, and other half equally between everyone

-No bonus payments to legacy teams

-Race calendar to max. 20 races per season - sorted by continents

-Free testing before the start of the season at any venue and time by teams chosing

-More engine suppliers, also allow more engine configurations

-More tyre suppliers?

-No fuel limitation for the race

-Every team should have a practice PU, quali PU and race PU. No limitations of those in terms of allocation per season, but introduce a rule that they need to use one as long as it works. Make special supervision over telemetry and inputs to see if an engine was blown on purpose. When it blows, a team can change it. So if quali engine blows in quali, they change it only for quali. If it blows in the race, than they get only a race engine for the next race. It is a bit of a gamble though, because it could happen that almost everyone could get a blown engine in the same race.

-Put a rule in place that all cars should be painted over 90% of the bodywork.

-Make cars shorter, lighter and less bulky.

-Rethink about track limits and how to enforce them (gravel traps, gravel strips, grass strips, techpro barriers right next to the curbs, etc..)

In general, this is how i would try and solve the problem.

[Farnborough]

I want to give my opinion here as well because it differs quite a lot from what some/many people in this thread are proposing. I think that is very interesting, and I'm not entirely sure what may be the cause of this.

First, I started watching F1 shortly after 2010. That means, for me, an F1 car has always had DRS and a (K)ERS system. Also, that was near the end of the V8's, so I never grew to associate the screaming V10 and V12 engines with Formula 1. This all probably has a noticeable impact on how I see Formula 1 today.

The screaming V10 and V12 engines from past times do sound impressive, that is for sure. But I also find them rather annoying (please forgive me) after hearing them for a while. And importantly, they don't spark the "hey that's proper F1" feeling in me like they do for some of you, apparently.

For me, Formula 1 is at least as much an engineering competition as it is a driver competition. That means technology should be on the bleeding edge. And being better than the rest by building the superior car is part of F1 for me. A balance of performance regulation would partially destroy what I like about F1.
But bleeding edge should also mean that reliability is not as close to 100% as it is now. In that regard, I agree a lot with the suggestions of @Andi76. Make the teams push their car more to the limit to make reliability a bigger factor again.

Additionally, pushing to the limit would mean that we the viewers can better see the incredible work that the drivers are doing. I wouldn't even necessarily argue that the car, fuel and tire management they are doing nowadays is much less demanding. But it is certainly something that the viewer doesn't visibly see much of. Wrestling the car while pushing to the limit is much better to watch.

Reintroducing refuelling would be interesting, for sure. More strategic options are certainly interesting for the avid fan. If you want to cater to a more casual audience as well, this added complexity is maybe not a good idea. And while I'd enjoy it a lot, I'm not sure that it would be beneficial for the sport overall.

In general, the ideas like BOP, reverse grids, going back to screaming V10s (or other engines just for the sake of the sound) are really not appealing to me. F1 should be an engineering competition. F1 should not be what it was back at some point. It should be on the bleeding edge of technology and that bleeding edge is moving forward and F1 needs to move with it.

This, a sample of atmo motors and light cars, beginning of series



is what's missing

Those Lewis and Alonso passes there absolutely mighty in this sport.

Ruined by batteries and excess weight.

[Oehrly]

@proteus, I'll try to respond to some points that are scatter throughout your response while trying to not take stuff out of context.

[...] The beauty if V10s was not only brutality, but also their fragility. Tou never knew when an engine will blow. [...]

I will simply argue that this won't be the case if your reintroduce V10s today. The fragility is not an inherent property of the V10 engine. It's a result of engineering and manufacturing and that is optimized through the roof nowadays. V10s today will be just as bulletproof as the current engines. In fact, from an engineering point of view, the current engines should be more fragile than a naturally aspirated V10 without ERS. Simply because the current PUs are a much more complex system overall with many more interconnected parts and thereby many more potential points of failures.
The only way around that, in my opinion, is to make it so that the teams need to run the engines (any engine) closer to the limit. But this is not achieved by changing the engine formula.

[...] F1 hit its peak somewhere in 99-00, held up there until 2002 and than gradually started to slide downhill. Mostly due to the great arrival of manufacturers which made an allready expensive sport even more expensive and neverending rule change with more and more limitations added.
[... Today] racing became more of damage control than pushing flatout. Cost saving everywhere and coasting in the race. There is no real rivalry, because when one team gets ahead it will stay there for a whole season or even more seasons due to the prohibition of testing and funding.

I kind of see where you are going with this. Without the manufacturer teams and with less money involved, things weren't engineered to perfection (although, one could say that that is what F1 should be really?). But on the other hand, you blame the sport getting more expensive for its apparent demise, while saying that the prohibition of testing and funding today also makes it worse. So what do you want to do about that? Ban manufacturer teams, so there are only teams who don't have that much money in the first place and are less professional? Surely not?

[...] The beauty if V10s was not only brutality, but also their fragility. Tou never knew when an engine will blow.
[...] I personally also dislike that 10 cars are in less than a second apart in quali, which mean if someone was unlucky by a gust of wind, it can be a difference if 5th or 10th on the grid. [...]

What's the real difference here? Both seems like a very random way to take a driver out of the competition. In one instance because your engine blew up. In the second instance, because the wind blew you off track. The effect is more or less the same. The driver has little control.
Is it the fact that car reliability can be influenced by the team, but the wind can't?

[...] Cars were twitchy, snappy and even champions were caught off guard from time to time and went off track. Tracks had gravel traps and mistakes cist drivers much more time than they do today where they simply drive out of track, many times full throttle. Liveries were diverse, cars in all shapes and sizes. Gaps between drivers were from few tenths, to seconds just between few places. Seeing underdogs get a surprise podium or points was great. [...]

This part I fully agree with. The snappy and twitchy cars look amazing and it's nice that they don't all look the same. But I don't agree with the solutions that are proposed in this thread.

Let's put it this way, I think that if you were to use the rules from the time when you say F1 had its peak and combine it with today's teams and engineering, you wouldn't get even close to the same racing. But many solutions that are suggested in this thread aim at making F1 more similar to "back then" in terms of the rules. And while I can agree with many of the intended consequences of such a change, I can't agree with the suggested means to achieve them. I neither see those changes be effective, nor do I think that those changes fit the character of F1 as the (engineering) pinacle of motorsport.

[proteus]

@proteus, I'll try to respond to some points that are scatter throughout your response while trying to not take stuff out of context.

[...] The beauty if V10s was not only brutality, but also their fragility. Tou never knew when an engine will blow. [...]

I will simply argue that this won't be the case if your reintroduce V10s today. The fragility is not an inherent property of the V10 engine. It's a result of engineering and manufacturing and that is optimized through the roof nowadays. V10s today will be just as bulletproof as the current engines. In fact, from an engineering point of view, the current engines should be more fragile than a naturally aspirated V10 without ERS. Simply because the current PUs are a much more complex system overall with many more interconnected parts and thereby many more potential points of failures.
The only way around that, in my opinion, is to make it so that the teams need to run the engines (any engine) closer to the limit. But this is not achieved by changing the engine formula.

[...] F1 hit its peak somewhere in 99-00, held up there until 2002 and than gradually started to slide downhill. Mostly due to the great arrival of manufacturers which made an allready expensive sport even more expensive and neverending rule change with more and more limitations added.
[... Today] racing became more of damage control than pushing flatout. Cost saving everywhere and coasting in the race. There is no real rivalry, because when one team gets ahead it will stay there for a whole season or even more seasons due to the prohibition of testing and funding.

I kind of see where you are going with this. Without the manufacturer teams and with less money involved, things weren't engineered to perfection (although, one could say that that is what F1 should be really?). But on the other hand, you blame the sport getting more expensive for its apparent demise, while saying that the prohibition of testing and funding today also makes it worse. So what do you want to do about that? Ban manufacturer teams, so there are only teams who don't have that much money in the first place and are less professional? Surely not?

[...] The beauty if V10s was not only brutality, but also their fragility. Tou never knew when an engine will blow.
[...] I personally also dislike that 10 cars are in less than a second apart in quali, which mean if someone was unlucky by a gust of wind, it can be a difference if 5th or 10th on the grid. [...]

What's the real difference here? Both seems like a very random way to take a driver out of the competition. In one instance because your engine blew up. In the second instance, because the wind blew you off track. The effect is more or less the same. The driver has little control.
Is it the fact that car reliability can be influenced by the team, but the wind can't?

[...] Cars were twitchy, snappy and even champions were caught off guard from time to time and went off track. Tracks had gravel traps and mistakes cist drivers much more time than they do today where they simply drive out of track, many times full throttle. Liveries were diverse, cars in all shapes and sizes. Gaps between drivers were from few tenths, to seconds just between few places. Seeing underdogs get a surprise podium or points was great. [...]

This part I fully agree with. The snappy and twitchy cars look amazing and it's nice that they don't all look the same. But I don't agree with the solutions that are proposed in this thread.

Let's put it this way, I think that if you were to use the rules from the time when you say F1 had its peak and combine it with today's teams and engineering, you wouldn't get even close to the same racing. But many solutions that are suggested in this thread aim at making F1 more similar to "back then" in terms of the rules. And while I can agree with many of the intended consequences of such a change, I can't agree with the suggested means to achieve them. I neither see those changes be effective, nor do I think that those changes fit the character of F1 as the (engineering) pinacle of motorsport.

The whole intention was to say that you need to push the materials to the limit. Even with modern technology i dare to say engines would be much more fragile if there would be no RPM limitation, no starting fuel quantity limitation and no limitiation on deployment time, with variety of engine configurations and real racing for whole race distance. No engine manufacturer would go for a safe option if limitations would be off.

Sport became boring in the moment when heavy limitations were introduced. Technology indeed became very expensive, but it also enabled many things to be done much cheaper than it was possible in the past. As i stated, a budget cap could still be in the effect, but aero boxes and engine regulations should be loosen.

As long as we will have F1 where drivers are coasting during a race to save components, fuel and tyres it will be boring. Even though F1 is at much better place as it was, it could have been much better.

Another problem with the whole budget formula are the facilities of each team. When a team has a state of the art facility, worth vast amounts of money, it doesnt matter if the budget cap for the season is at 150mil, because their capacity of computation, manufacturing and personell is levels above smaller teams, which means in the end nothing much is really done with the budget cap in the first place. It helps only if they seriously miss their targets and produce an unsolvable car under the cap.

[Oehrly]

The whole intention was to say that you need to push the materials to the limit. Even with modern technology i dare to say engines would be much more fragile if there would be no RPM limitation, no starting fuel quantity limitation and no limitiation on deployment time, with variety of engine configurations and real racing for whole race distance. No engine manufacturer would go for a safe option if limitations would be off.

Sport became boring in the moment when heavy limitations were introduced. Technology indeed became very expensive, but it also enabled many things to be done much cheaper than it was possible in the past. As i stated, a budget cap could still be in the effect, but aero boxes and engine regulations should be loosen.

As long as we will have F1 where drivers are coasting during a race to save components, fuel and tyres it will be boring. Even though F1 is at much better place as it was, it could have been much better.

Another problem with the whole budget formula are the facilities of each team. When a team has a state of the art facility, worth vast amounts of money, it doesnt matter if the budget cap for the season is at 150mil, because their capacity of computation, manufacturing and personell is levels above smaller teams, which means in the end nothing much is really done with the budget cap in the first place. It helps only if they seriously miss their targets and produce an unsolvable car under the cap.

I agree with many parts here. Maybe excluding the "variety of engine configurations", I'm undecided if that is a good idea.
Also, I'm unsure whether loosening the regulations will always lead to more interesting racing. I can see a scenario where one team has a big enough engine advantage to dominate (at least to some extent) and the rest has no idea how they're doing it. And they can't catch up because a cost cap limits development and testing of new ideas. And if there was no cost cap, only the big teams could catch up while the smaller ones are left behind. So I think loosening the regulations would not be a simple task. A lot of thought would need to be put into that.

And I think that budget cap vs existing facilities that some teams have and others don't is really a fairly big problem.

[Xwang]

I think that it is possible for FIA to create a nominal cost per item on the basis of last years teams expenditure documents.
After that is done I'll remove the cost cap as it is made today (not enforceable and only based on the assumption of existance of whistblower) and replace it with an annual nominal cost gap. each new item a team uses in an official session is accounted for its nominal cost and summed to the amount the team has spent. That way the FIA can check at the race.
then all CFD, wind tunnel and private test limit should be removed because not enforceable and useless in the long term. IMHO.

[PapayaFan481]

My solution, open up the PU rules, stop limiting number of items allowed etc. We have a cost cap, so that naturally limits expenditure on these.

[SealTheRealDeal]

On the performance side of things:
The floor being such a performance differentiator isn't good. It's neither seen nor heard yet apparently it's what dictates the running order in the current formula. Also one team seems to be a full quantum leap ahead of the others in its understanding of underbody aero. Would a spec or pseudo-spec* floor coupled with more freedom elsewhere be desirable?

*like how the flat floor was regulated before 2022, but with some sort of standardized venturi tunnel geometry

On the engineering side of things:
The current engine formula has overstayed its welcome. After 10 years it's no longer particularly road relevant or cutting edge, and in terms of spectacle current F1 is really lacking the noise that other racing series have in spades. I'm willing to give the 2026 engine regs a chance, no MufflerGU-H, higher revs, and possible anti-lag pops and bangs will do something for the noise. However I do think a return to natural aspiration should be considered, not just for spectacle, but for road relevance as well. Outside of the shrinking sub-compact market, the era of the microscopic turbo charged engine is done because they run too hot to score well on modern emissions tests and the market as a whole has shifted strongly towards SUVs, vans, and trucks. A return to bigger (I'd even go to 4.0L to avoid losing too much torque) naturally aspirated engines could be easily justified IMO.

On the operational side of things:
Get 11th, 12th, and 13th teams asap, and adjust the cost cap for the insane inflation that has occurred since the cap was first agreed to.

[hollus]

I think unpredictability was a part of the allure of the past. It made boring races potentially interesting... although many then stayed boring. The same way a 0-0 soccer game can be interesting... because you don't know if the 0-0 will stay. Witness the last race, with the random Verstappen DNF (not engine related).
And then, I think that the multiple races per engine idea was the absolute worst thing to do regarding that.

Imagine that your engine is modeled to last a certain distance, +/- 20%, when pushed to a certain level.

In the 1 race per engine scenario, you'd adjust that pushing level to make your engine lasts for about 350 km (+/- 20%). 1 or 2 would still blow per race, or with today's telemetry, they'd limp to the finish line, losing positions anyways.
You could set it to 400 km and guarantee performance to the end, but you then lose performance all around. Or you can risk setting it to 280 km, maybe for your home race, maybe that day there is a strategic gamble... and hope. But some engines will blow up if you are even approaching the limits.
There might be signs of imminent failure, and modern telemetry will catch any, but live telemetry won't catch those few metal shavings in the oil that signal a failing seal, for example.

Now back to the current approx. 7 races per engine scenario: You adjust your engine to last for 7.4 races...
No engine (almost none) blows up for the first 6 races.
If an engine is defective, it costs you 1% performance during, say, race 3, and you might change it for the 4th race, well before it fails or even drops much performance.
If they fail slowly, you'll have the race to race period to comb through the telemetry, oil analysis, bench testing, etc, to decide its state.
Come the 7th race, you can analyze the hell out of this particular engine and decide if it will hold for the 7th, maybe even 8th race, or maybe give it a Monaco outing if it is "almost 7".
Either way, no random DNF, no large swings in performance, but hey, maybe a 10 place grid drop if you use an extra engine (not so surprising, not so exciting).

1 race engines might be expensive... but only as expensive as allowed, we do, after all, have a cost cap and mandatory minimum and maximum prices for customer teams.

[sp8472]

I think unpredictability was a part of the allure of the past. It made boring races potentially interesting... although many then stayed boring. The same way a 0-0 soccer game can be interesting... because you don't know if the 0-0 will stay. Witness the last race, with the random Verstappen DNF (not engine related).
And then, I think that the multiple races per engine idea was the absolute worst thing to do regarding that.

Imagine that your engine is modeled to last a certain distance, +/- 20%, when pushed to a certain level.

In the 1 race per engine scenario, you'd adjust that pushing level to make your engine lasts for about 350 km (+/- 20%). 1 or 2 would still blow per race, or with today's telemetry, they'd limp to the finish line, losing positions anyways.
You could set it to 400 km and guarantee performance to the end, but you then lose performance all around. Or you can risk setting it to 280 km, maybe for your home race, maybe that day there is a strategic gamble... and hope. But some engines will blow up if you are even approaching the limits.
There might be signs of imminent failure, and modern telemetry will catch any, but live telemetry won't catch those few metal shavings in the oil that signal a failing seal, for example.

Now back to the current approx. 7 races per engine scenario: You adjust your engine to last for 7.4 races...
No engine (almost none) blows up for the first 6 races.
If an engine is defective, it costs you 1% performance during, say, race 3, and you might change it for the 4th race, well before it fails or even drops much performance.
If they fail slowly, you'll have the race to race period to comb through the telemetry, oil analysis, bench testing, etc, to decide its state.
Come the 7th race, you can analyze the hell out of this particular engine and decide if it will hold for the 7th, maybe even 8th race, or maybe give it a Monaco outing if it is "almost 7".
Either way, no random DNF, no large swings in performance, but hey, maybe a 10 place grid drop if you use an extra engine (not so surprising, not so exciting).

1 race engines might be expensive... but only as expensive as allowed, we do, after all, have a cost cap and mandatory minimum and maximum prices for customer teams.

I could not agree with this position more. The Melbourne race took me back to the days when even with a 20 sec lead there was still excitement because you knew at any moment his engine could blow up. F1 has just become too reliable. Seems like a silly thing to say, but engines that were built to the limit provided a greater performance differential and a certain randomness that made racing thrilling.

Most team already exceed their engine allocation as it is anyway, replacing slightly tired engines for fresh ones at strategic races, where penalties don’t impact as much.

We have a cost cap. Let teams play within that cap as much as they please. F1 should quit this attempt to appear sustainable, at least in regards to tyres and engines.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[SealTheRealDeal]

I'm not sure the engine reliability genie can be put back in the bottle. Retiring on the side of the track in a plume of white smoke is bad advertising, and really bad for one's championship hopes. I imagine that even without the engine reliability requirements the manufacturers would still make their engines much more reliable than they used to.

What about a return to the super fragile tires of the early 2010s as the chance factor? Returning to tires that are soft as cheese and which sometimes explode for no reason wouldn't just bring back unpredictability, it could also make pit strategy more varied.

[hollus]

Why would a different logic apply to an engine going out in smoke than to a tire going out with a bang?